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Camino Island

After being laid off from her teaching position, Mercer Mann is approached by a mysterious woman with a generous offer to go undercover and infiltrate bookstore owner Bruce Cable's life to learn his secrets.

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I borrowed this book for a second time, forgetting that I had started it once before and didn't like it. I still don't like it. It is not up to the usual standard set by Grisham's early books. Sycamore Row was another less than the usual standard.

Just struggled through Camino Island and what a chore it was; certainly not what I've come to expect from Grisham's earlier works. It's way too wordy and the plot is beyond belief. He needs to go back to what he does best.

I've read countless Grisham novels and have enjoyed almost all of them, including some of his offbeat entries (e.g., "Playing for Pizza," which I enjoyed immensely). However, "Camino Island" is not a good book, and but for the Grisham name, I doubt it would have been published. It drifts from a promising suspense/thriller text into a tepid romance novel populated with predictable characters. The scenario behind the role of the protagonist is implausible, and the conclusion is bland and unsatisfying. If you must read the latest Grisham work, help yourself, but don't expect it to meet his typical level of quality.

It was difficult to read as a book. In the book he talks about books and stories that you just force yourself to finish to see how it ends...this is that book. Unfortunately his novels have been getting progressively very "shallow" and the stories have been non-engaging. He seems to infuse political opinion in the stories more and more...that doesn't necessarily make for great "escape" literature. This is the last book I read of his.

Camino Island is the ideal beach read. It brought me back to my favorite hideaway. This is a much different book from Grisham. I learned a lot about the world of books - writing and collecting. I liked it. He left it wide open for a sequel as well.

I read this book before reading The Rooster Bar by same author. If you haven't read The Rooster Bar yet, it's about the high cost of law school tuition and three pals who scam the scammers. Reflecting back on reading Camino Island which is about the "fictionalized" Princeton University owning original manuscripts of F. Scott Fitzgerald worth millions of dollars, guarded and kept under lock and key, and although I realize the book is fiction, if universities have become serious collectors of rare pieces of literature locked away where very few are allowed to peruse, what do these collections benefit the average college student? Perhaps we've discovered a connection (one of just many) to the outrageous tuition challenge. Spoiler Alert: The book collector who buys the stolen manuscripts gets off scott-free, the University absorbs the loss along with the insurance company, and ultimately the cost is passed on to consumers . . . where has that happened before? I'm becoming less and less of a Grisham fan with each book. I actually finished the book but it was a disappointment. My advice to Grisham is . . . come back to the typewriter and exorcise the ghostwriters!

Almost a short story, this book is a long way from Grisham's earlier books for which he is well known, but I liked it as a beach story. For the protagonist to make such an egregious mistake to keep the plot going 'jumped the shark' for me. I can't help but think how hard it must be for author's to keep up with their own past success.

Quotes

“I did manage to ditch my prologue, add quotation marks to my dialogue, take out the big words, and I would have cut some more but there’s not enough to cut.”
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I learned with my first novel that writing books is far easier than selling them.
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Writers are generally split into two camps: those who carefully outline their stories and know the ending before they begin, and those who refuse to do so upon the theory that once a character is created he or she will do something interesting.

Deep in the Left Bank of Paris, in the heart of the 6th arrondissement on Rue St.-Sulpice, Monsieur Gaston Chappelle ran a tidy little bookshop that had changed little in twenty-eight years. Such stores are scattered throughout the center of the city, each with a different specialty. Monsieur Chappelle’s was rare French, Spanish, and American novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Two doors down, a friend dealt only in ancient maps and atlases. Around the corner, another traded in old prints and letters written by historic figures.